3D Martian Flyover Movies

Matthew Sparkes writes "NASA has created two virtual flyovers of the Mars rover landing sites using 3D imagery from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (New Scientist story here). The images were made using the most powerful camera ever sent to another planet, MRO's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE). The three-dimensional information is obtained by taking pairs of images from slightly different vantage points as the spacecraft orbits the Red Planet."

Vista Pro

[Excelcia]

I was using Vista Pro over 10 years ago to do flyovers on Mars. I made some great movies flying over and around Olympus Mons. The images that it generated with simple texturing and DEM [wikipedia.org] formatted landscape data was almost as good (considering resolution differences) as what I see there. I am singularly unimpressed with what they have now. Better yet, with a few changes in rendering rules, I could "terraform" Mars and see what Olympus Mons would look like with water and a treeline. I may see if I can dig out my old DOS copy of Vista Pro and play with it again.

What is the height exaggeration?

[jiawen]

What height exaggeration were the flyovers done with? NASA has a long history of doing planetary animations that make things look way taller than they actually are, apparently in an attempt to make the animations appeal more to the public. Are these flyovers similarly exaggerated? If so, I'm not interested.

Re:Vista Pro

[phlosoft]

The images that it generated with simple texturing and DEM formatted landscape data was almost as good (considering resolution differences) as what I see there. I am singularly unimpressed with what they have now.

And where do you think that digital elevation model came from? The news here isn't the 3D rendering engine, it is the acquisition of the 3D data + textures in the first place -- it is that they are automatically building the highest resolution DEM of Mars ever acquired using high resolution stereo imagery. But you're right, now that they've done the easy, unimpressive part, I'm sure we'd all love to see what amazing things you can do with their model in Vista Pro.

Re:What is the height exaggeration?

[PhotoGuy]

What height exaggeration were the flyovers done with? NASA has a long history of doing planetary animations that make things look way taller than they actually are, apparently in an attempt to make the animations appeal more to the public. Are these flyovers similarly exaggerated? If so, I'm not interested.

You see the same thing with stereoscopic aerial photographs of earth. I believe that around here (Nova Scotia), when you view the Department of Natural Resources photos in stereo, you get something like a 10-to-1 exaggeration of height. It's not a marketing thing to "appeal more to the public", but allows one to actually notice height differences. If it weren't for the exaggeration, we wouldn't be able to perceive any height differences. The world really is amazingly flat (consider the view from space, it looks like a perfect sphere). Without some exaggeration, perhaps NASA videos wouldn't be "less marketable", but just completely unremarkable (who wants to look at nothing but seemingly flat surfaces).

(In the case of aerial photographs, the exaggeration is simply an artifact of the spacing of the photos and the spacing of the human eyes; it's not some major plot to deceive. But the exaggeration is actually useful for people doing work in the field.)